


Becoming Virus

by astraev



Category: Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
Genre: Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 16:03:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2818091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astraev/pseuds/astraev
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Fun facts, which helped me form this Fic:</p>
<p>1) Power Strips were invented in 1979. Surge protection was added at an ungoogle-able later date, though was available as rudimentary technology in the 1950s. The history is fuzzy, I've taken liberties.<br/>2) Turbo Time seems to be a side scroller (and I’m assuming it is), and the new game, RoadBlasters is a "top down racer.” TurboTime was released in 1982, and RoadBlasters in 1987.<br/>3) The Konami code was popularized by the home NES version of Contra, which was so difficult that a developer couldn't play it. He put the code in so he could successfully test it, but didn't take it out before production. Contra also had an arcade version, which existed before the home version.<br/>4) Tapper was plugged in in 1983.<br/>5) Sugar Rush was plugged in 1997. King Candy occupied it for 15 years. The movie takes place in 2012.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Becoming Virus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lady_Ganesh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Ganesh/gifts).



> Fun facts, which helped me form this Fic:
> 
> 1) Power Strips were invented in 1979. Surge protection was added at an ungoogle-able later date, though was available as rudimentary technology in the 1950s. The history is fuzzy, I've taken liberties.  
> 2) Turbo Time seems to be a side scroller (and I’m assuming it is), and the new game, RoadBlasters is a "top down racer.” TurboTime was released in 1982, and RoadBlasters in 1987.  
> 3) The Konami code was popularized by the home NES version of Contra, which was so difficult that a developer couldn't play it. He put the code in so he could successfully test it, but didn't take it out before production. Contra also had an arcade version, which existed before the home version.  
> 4) Tapper was plugged in in 1983.  
> 5) Sugar Rush was plugged in 1997. King Candy occupied it for 15 years. The movie takes place in 2012.

He wanted to race, what was wrong with that? No one was playing TurboTime anymore, because it wasn’t as “realistic” as RoadBlasters -- but what were they expecting? This was racing in a giant wooden box! If they wanted realism, they could go drive go-karts in the real world. The world inside TurboTime was good enough for him, it was what he was coded for, it was what he always wanted and already had.

Except that he wasn’t racing anymore. Turbo wanted the speed, he wanted the thrill, and he wanted the triumph of winning. But his compatriots didn’t want to race him anymore, the losers. And so he couldn’t race without quarters. And the quarters had stopped coming.

So, he ventured out of the game. In 1987 the power strip was unclaimed territory -- it was dark, and dank, and smelled like electrical smoke. Most people didn’t venture out of their games -- the strip was a dangerous place, with rough boards on the floor and lose nails sticking out at odd angles. One of the aliens from space invaders had once fallen down a hole and exploded -- and now space invaders was down one alien. The power strip was a dangerous place -- one where regeneration didn’t happen.

Turbo walked the long way through the portal into RoadBlasters. This was a rough time in the arcade, long before anyone would have thought of building a rail system. And he set himself up to race. Here he could join the fray again, and be triumphant.

The first quarter first thing in the morning was exciting. Turbo launched from his hiding place into the race.

The real problem with jumping from his game to the new, fancy, upstart of a game wasn’t that the game had an extra racer, it was that this game was different. Before, turbo could go in straight lines across the screen. But when he went in straight lines across the screen in RoadBlasters, he crossed the roads. He distracted the other racers. One spun out of control and hit a tree. The entire landscape pixelated and flashed, and the voices of the gamers could be heard: “Was that Turbo? Hey! The game’s broken!”

He ran, and he hid in the strip. The twins from his game tried looking for him, shouting into the gloom of the strip, “Turbo! We just want you to come home! Things can be okay!”

The racers from road blasters tried to find them, “Hey, we just want to talk!” But they quickly retreated back into their own games, hoping for the best. Maybe a hard restart would help. Maybe the gamer’s confidence could be restored.

But the writing was apparent on the wall. He wasn’t welcome in turbo time any longer. And he was too different for roadblasters. So he hid in the strip. And he witnessed his friends, his competitors become nonexistent when the plugs were pulled, and no survivors. Except him.

\--

Off on stage left of PacMan, Turbo found that, just like in TurboTime, there was plenty of world to hide in. not as much as he would find later, in newer video games, but there was enough to be “lost” and gone… and still occasionally hear the gossip. He knew the deepest mazes of pacman like the back of his hand.

One day, he found that much like there was a wide passage way to the plug where he could travel to the strip, there was a narrow opening that seemed to lead to a void. As Turbo creeper up to this opening and peered inside, he found a ladder -- rickety but serviceable. And so he climbed it.

And found himself inside the hardware of the game.

Where he could see the inner workings, where he could see how the maze was put together, why the ghosts sought out pacman -- their motivation -- and why pacman wanted to run the maze.

He couldn't help it, he had to touch. He wondered, somehow, if he had found this opening in RoadBlasters, or if he had found it in TurboTime... He wouldn't have had to be so different, different in a way that lead to glitches and death.

He wouldn't have been obsolete anymore. He could have been cutting edge.

And so he changed one dot. He changed the color, the flavor, and when the arcade opened the next day he listened as the gamers wondered about the different colored dot and listened as they asked Litwak. Litwak chalked it up to a frozen pixel -- and a thrill went through Turbo. Some changes could be made that no one would care about, that could be overlooked.

\--

PacMan was a delightful place to hide, experiment, and learn, except when the day came that the power strip was upgraded to a surge protector.

Litwak seemed to have sense that his arcade was more than met the eye, and he stood in front of the games and said, "I promise you won't be unplugged long." He explained his plan to keep the strip plugged in, add the surge protector to the outlet, and move the games over one by one.

No one wanted to be inside a game when it was unplugged -- if it was unplugged longer than a minute or two, the power drained completely and the universe restarted. If the original inhabitants fled to the Strip, and it was unplugged too long, there would be duplicate sprites, duplicate playable characters in the game. Redundancy and identity crises all in one.

The safest way to make this happen for the denizens of Litwak's arcade was thus to pile into the Strip from the games, go to the wall socket, and then repopulate the games one they were plugged in again.

Turbo had to get out, he had to be a part of that exodus so that he would not perish, so he wouldn't be lost if the power was gone too long, but neither could he be seen and known as Turbo. He knew the gossip and disdain that has developed around his story -- he was a cautionary tale about staying within your programming, and the source of much grief and anger for lost friends.

So, for the first time, he sought out the node in the code that was him: because he was inside the game the programming had to expand to include him, so that he would act by the laws of the universe. But he had never touched his own code before. He was afraid of disaster, of losing something that was essentially him, maybe his ability or desire to race. The need to drive, to race was still immense, but he needed it. He needed it to be himself.

He look the code and slowly began to change his appearance. He began to make himself different, allow himself to move in all directions. And when the crowd was big enough in the Strip that no one would notice him, he joined the throngs going towards life.

\--

The new power strip was a gleaming, white world with signs, and most significantly, surge protectors, looking for problems and protecting what would come to be called Game Central Station. They stopped him occasionally, these surge protectors. They wanted to know where he was going and what he was doing. But with his new disguise and the way between games safe and bright, Turbo felt free to come and go. A little tweak of the code kept the surge protectors away.

But there was still no racing game in Litwak's arcade.

Turbo spent the afterhours and many days in Tapper. Before the upgrade, he transversed the Strip for root beer. Before, Tapper had been a friend. Now, he was all alone.

It was in Tapper that he heard it. The fighters from Contra complaining about how gamers kept trying this code. " ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A! That's for the home game, it doesn't work here! It takes real skill in the arcade!"

"Wait, wait, say that again?" Asked Turbo, dressed in his latest disguise as a sprite from Fix-it Felix, Jr.

He wrote it down.

And suddenly the newer games were open to him, ones that had mysterious coverings with control panels in front of their access wires.

And when the new racing game came, he was ready.


End file.
